How will we sit through shul? Just talk to each other, like everybody else.

Where are you eating for Shabbos? I don't know.

The reason I thought of Shabbos as a burden was, for one thing, that it literally "interrupted" work. In a faithless world, work is what pays the bills - not the Hand of God.

Another reason I thought of Shabbos as a burden was the framework within which I learned what it means to be an observant Jew. It was very much a math equation: The fewer "things you did" on Shabbos--the more you oppressed yourself with restrictions--the more religious you were.

I have since come to see that Shabbos is about stepping away from your natural disbelief in God.

By that I mean that as a human being living in a material world, it is logical to focus on the things we see and hear and can touch as true. It is less logical to simply "believe."

Shabbos, as a method of religious practice, can be seen as a meditation on the true reality of the world. A world where God is in charge, and from God flows the blessings and the lessons (what we think of as punishments).

Those who read my blog are familiar with the fact that I (and the members of my family) have been seeing the number 613 everywhere for several years now. This is the number of commandments in the Torah.

The number is a reminder, a warning, a message and three years later I am starting to get it.

I now understand why for so many years I hated being a Jew. What they taught me in yeshiva, and in the culture I grew up in, had nothing to do with God. It had everything to do with following the Torah, which I do believe God gave us, but only in the way that we were told was appropriate.

When I tried to talk about God, the discussion was cut off. As if to insult me, once I was called a God-talker.

We only do what's right, I was told. We only follow the Torah.

I think in a way this very artificial mode of living turned me into a brand kind of person.

Why?

Because a brand, essentially, is the artificial construct of a religion. You have a set of beliefs, a name, a picture, some words, and you put it together and follow. Ostensibly to make money, but it's really about more than that. It's about finding something to identify with, in the absence of a deep-rooted community and belief system of your own.

If I had been taught about God properly, I never would have turned to brands to fill that void.

It is God who powers all things.

It is God who gave us the Torah.

It is NOT idol-worship to focus your life on God, serving God, and all the behaviors that follow from that.

While religions and rabbis can quibble about exactly which thing we are supposed to do, and when and why, the bottom line is that Shabbos is about the full acknowledgment of Him.

It's not about who has the best recipe for Challah.

It's not about who can sit in Shul the longest.

It's not about who has the fanciest house, the most guests, and so on.

We should get back to ourselves as Jews, as people, as human beings. It's time to reclaim the essence.

Reclaiming can start with Shabbos.

However you do or don't observe, I hope you have a good one.

_________________

Posted Nov. 24, 2017 by Dr. Dannielle (Dossy) Blumenthal. All opinions are the author's own. This post is hereby released into the public domain. CC0 photo by stevepb via Pixabay.

I was standing in line last night waiting for a shwarma plate and as usual began to offer my opinions about how to run the business better:

·Eliminate most of the menu - because 90% of the time, people are there to get either shwarma or falafel;

·Except for expensive things like meat, let people put their own toppings on the plate - because it's time-consuming for the owner to ask me what I want, and it's more appealing to take your own toppings;

·Offer an app so that people can order before showing up, or get delivery - because waiting is a pain.

It's not clear to me whether I think this way from a marketing point of view, a strategy point of view, a business point of view, and IT point of view or a writer's point of view. What's the difference? In the end, the idea is to focus. It's Pareto's Principle: 80% of the value comes from 20% of the work.

This reminds me of when I was a kid, growing up, and I used to visit my grandparents in the Catskill mountains once or twice a year. They would always have something called "Neapolitan" ice cream in the freezer. For those of you who don't know what this looks like, it's vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice cream, living together in a gallon container in side-by-side blocks.

I would have preferred an entire container of chocolate, but the idea of Neapolitan is to give people a "choice."

In real life, of course, we all vied for the chocolate block first, the vanilla second, and left the strawberry for "somebody else." (Maybe you would have gone for the vanilla first...)

The point is, for whatever reason, it is common to believe that "more choice" is somehow more appealing.

It's not; what I find is that it's confusing. (Just try going to the grocery store, and getting a simple bottle of ketchup from among the many sizes, brands and flavors.)

The same thing tends to happen with technology platforms at work. It is hard for people to learn how to use a computer system. But things get even more difficult when you offer them multiple ways to do essentially the same thing. Just try to get a team together to decide whether to collaborate over a shared drive, SharePoint, a specialized collaboration system or a cloud-based tool.

Communication campaigns, of course, are notorious for changing "message" from one year to the next or even more frequently than that.

And the institutional arrangements that govern all this, aside from the normal human turnover, tend to be shaped and reshaped into blocks that have little or nothing to do with how the customer actually uses them.

Consultants, service providers and product developers make a living from all this confusion by calling it "competition," "innovation" and "growth." To some extent that is true; through an ongoing conversation about the best way to do things, improvements are made.

But we sacrifice something when we uncritically accept so much complexity in our lives.

The key from a leadership point of view is to integrate all things related to people, process and technology under a single dashboard, and to manage them as one cohesive unit.

How do you know when you're successful? Literacy in strategy, technology and culture goes up; productivity goes up; customer satisfaction goes up; and the results you've already clearly identified, for the audiences that you serve, are measurably better.